


Innocent

by thearrogantemu



Category: The Inheritance Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Forgiveness, Gen, Involuntary Servitude, Loyalty, Minor Sieh/Deka, Revenge, Sixteen is the Worst, fraught familial dynamics, siblings and their trickster god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearrogantemu/pseuds/thearrogantemu
Summary: Deka fell silent, and I saw him trace the sigil on his forehead with a finger in an almost unconscious gesture.“That made her angry,” he said after a long moment, “and so… She wanted to hurt me like I’d hurt her. She asked our mother to have my mark filled in before I was sent away. So she would have nothing to fear from me, she said.”I let out a long sigh. Was this the girl who’d refused to choose between her innocence and her brother’s life? Oh well.“It was nice while it lasted,” I said aloud.
Relationships: Shahar (II) & Deka Arameri
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Innocent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schneefink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schneefink/gifts).



> The prompt invited me to explore the sibling dynamics between the twins, and so I considered what might have happened if Shahar had used the weapon that was always pointed at her brother: the sigil that meant he could not act against the Arameri. How would Deka, forced to confront his second-class status within his family, cope with his separation from his sister compounded with her betrayal? And what if Deka, rather than Shahar, had been the one to summon Sieh after the disastrous incident on the Nowhere Stair?

Inkitty blinkitty bottle of ink  
My mother brought me a bottle to drink  
Hackabone, crackabone, nobody’s home  
O-U-T spells OUT and OUT goes YOU!

***

I was pulled out of the cool darkness as slippery and squalling as any infant. Struggling to right myself, blinking against the light, I half expected my summoner to pick me up by the heels, pound me on the back, and announce to the world  _ it’s a boy! _

Wait.

Not a boy. I could feel it in my skin, in my teeth, in limbs suddenly too long and too bony for comfort. It burred in my throat, it echoed in my head (which isn’t exactly where we godlings keep our minds, but in human shape it’ll do). I wasn’t a boy at all.

I was a  _ youth. _

And so, apparently, was my summoner.

He lay where he had fallen, face down in the center of the summoning sigil he had drawn on the dark wood floor. Scrivener’s robes billowed around him, but did nothing to conceal the lanky limbs and the raw, light frame of mid-adolescence — just the same as mine. A  _ teenager  _ had done this to me. I’d be impressed, if I weren’t so pissed. 

No mortal scrivener should have been capable of finding me drifting deep in the dimensions of the Nightlord. No  _ being, _ mortal or otherwise, should have been capable of yanking me out. Why had Nahadoth not come to drag this invader into one of the really interesting hells? Was Naha leaving him for me? I could certainly use the sustenance — I was weak and dizzy and a teenager, and I’d just spent who the infinite hells knows how long in some kind of Nahadoth-assisted power nap. I tried to pull my form into something more carnivorous, reaching for the fangs and claws of my cat shape.

I – caught on something. That was how it felt, anyway; as if I’d snagged my clothes on a doorknob while running down a hallway, my motion suddenly arrested by some unseen force. Only it wasn’t my clothes (I didn’t have any of those at the moment) but my self, my  _ me _ . I couldn’t change shape, not even to a familiar, favorite one. What had happened to me? Had I ever been this weak, even under the lash of my old masters in Sky?

Well, all the more reason to find myself some sustenance, then, and surely I could still gnaw this stripling’s soul into atomies. Madness wasn’t my favorite meal — it was more to Naha’s taste than mine — but caprice, cruelty, the sheer pleasure of lashing out without the slightest care for consequence, that should be close enough to my nature to give me enough strength to get out of this horrible teenageness.

The first problem, though, was going to be sitting up. I was trying to do it, scrabbling pitifully against the rich wood of the floor, when the scrivener groaned, stirred, and lifted his head. I froze, registering three truths of equal importance in an instant.

1: My summoner was Dekarta Arameri.

2: He was a good eight years older than when I had last seen him (screaming, clinging to my hand and his sister’s as the world crumbled around us.)

3: The full blood sigil was scored into his forehead.

Well, if he meant to keep me from killing him right off, that was how to do it. The one thing that could have prevented me from shredding my summoner’s soul: curiosity. My little Deka had grown up smart. (Half-grown. Skewered between childhood and adulthood, just like me.)

Before I had time to pull myself together, before I had decided what I wanted to do with him (or myself), Deka’s quick dark eyes were darting around the room, piecing together where he was and why. And when those eyes lit on me, curse him, his smile broke like the dawn. His face shone as no Arameri face should be capable of shining, wonder and love scrawled across it more plainly than the servant-mark on his brow.

“It worked,” he breathed. “It worked — oh,  _ Sieh —” _

He started toward me as if he meant to pull me into an embrace, his hand reaching out for mine. He stopped himself at the last minute. Smart. Look at what happened last time.

“What,” I said, “what the absolute fuck have you done to me?”

Deka sat back on his heels. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said simply. “I’ve been looking for you for years.”

“Years?” Nahadoth’s darkness stretched between, but surely it had not been that long since the Nowhere Stair, when I’d taken the hands of two children who named me  _ friend _ and the world had ended because of it.

“I needed to know you were all right,” he said. “And I needed to ask you — did you do it?”

“Did I do what?” Shamefully, my voice was shaking – frustration and anger and cold and exhaustion and this — this  _ mortality,  _ gumming up my power and perception. Why couldn’t I change my shape? And Deka, as if he were still the gentle, free boy who’d offered me his hand, bent over me, wrapping me in a large soft blanket that smelled of books and magic and him.

“Did you blow up the Nowhere Stair eight years ago?” he said, sitting down beside me. “Did you try to kill us?”

“Of course I didn’t!” Demonshit, was I about to cry? “We took the oath, and – and something went wrong, and I think my father saved me except maybe he didn’t because I don’t feel right, and now it’s eight years later and  _ you _ –“ That was good; anger was better than tears. “You really did turn out exactly like the rest of them, didn’t you? Just couldn’t resist seeing how far that oath went? Seeing if your pet godling would come when you called? Well, good job, Dekarta. Here I am. Now give me one good reason that I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

“I’m sorry, Sieh,” he said softly. “I was worried for you, but for me to summon you like that...I know you were bound to our family’s service, once, and it must have been a painful reminder of those times.” He gestured at his fullblood mark. “I know a little of what it’s like to be controlled by — by those who say they love you. By those against whom you cannot strike back. I’m sorry.”

“You’re  _ sorry?” _ I spat. “You think that’s a reason for me not to kill you?”

“No,” he said mildly, “that’s just something I wanted to tell you. The actual reason you’re not going to kill me is you don’t have the strength to stand up.”

I paused for a moment, then burst out laughing, so hard my ribs ached with it. Not quite the meek little boy who’d lain still in my arms with my knife to his throat! How many of his relatives underestimated him because of his gentleness? But I caught a glimpse of the mark on his forehead and I sobered. Clearly not enough of them.

“Fine, all right,” I said, “But don’t come crying to me when my father shows up to rip your soul into quivering ribbons.”

“Nahadoth, you mean? Oh, we’ve already spoken about it.”

“You’ve  _ what,”  _ I said.

“I was looking for you,” he said again, “for years. Of course I ran into him eventually, and he said that something had happened to you and that he hadn’t been able to heal you at all, and if I thought I could wake you, I was welcome to try.” He gave me a warm sardonic smile. “Of course I wasn’t going to just reach into the Nightlord and pull something out of him; I’m an explorer of untested magical frontiers but I’m not  _ stupid. _ ” 

“We are not talking about you,” I snapped, “we’re talking about me. I’m dying!”

He started toward me with a look of concern. 

“Dying like you are, I mean,” I clarified. “Speeding towards death like an arrow fired at a target. I have a direction now, besides  _ what sounds like fun next,  _ and that direction is deathward. I’m  _ aging!  _ This body wants to rot and rut and — and  _ sleep.  _ Disgusting!”

If I had to guess, I was around sixteen and aging by the second. Ugh, is there any age worse than sixteen? You’re older than you’ve ever been or will ever be again. No one knows more than a sixteen-year-old thinks he does. Plus everything from a kind smile to a potted plant gives you a boner. Sixteen’s fine to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Deka reached out and took my wrist lightly in his fingers, like a physician feeling for a pulse. I saw faint lines traced along those fingers — scriveners’ signs, doubtless; they liked to write on themselves to mark new accomplishments. I couldn’t imagine mortal magic being any help to me, if even Nahadoth had been baffled by my condition.

“It feels a bit like what Itempas did to me,” I said, as Deka studied me, “and I don’t like it. Except — it’s not so much like I’ve been stuffed into mortality as mortality’s been stuffed into me. Do you have any idea what’s doing it?” 

Deka sat back on his heels, setting my wrist down gently. “It’s not something I did to you with the summoning,” he said, “any more than what happened on the stair that day was something you did to us. I think something happened to all of us then, but I don’t know what.” 

He traced a shape with his finger in the palm of his other hand, and all at once I saw it, as clearly as if the memory were my own: shattered blocks of white stone where the stair had been, dust still hanging in the air over the rubble, and — oh gods — a smear of red, a dark blotch among the stones.

Then the image shifted: darkness, shot through with light and pain.  _ Deka? _ whispered a voice I knew.  _ Deka, are you there? Deka, please... _

Deka closed his hand and the images vanished. “We both lived,” he said. “Shahar and I. We were near the top of the ruins, and they found us in time. You were nowhere to be found, of course. Once it came out that we’d been meeting you, Mother was certain that you’d done this to us. Why wouldn’t you? You’d been biding your time, waiting for a chance to get vengeance on any Arameri who were foolish enough to stray into your trap...”

To be fair, that did sound like something I would do.

“But by then it was too late. Most of Sky was convinced that it was me.”

He stared ruefully at his marked hands, the delicate tracery of sigils down his fingers a subtle contrast to his skin. “They didn’t need much convincing. The story practically told itself. Of course it was me who’d tried to kill Shahar. Who else had a better motive but the jealous second, the scorned twin, the spare, the shadow brother?  _ Foreign blood will out. _ ”

“That makes no sense,” I said, “and this is coming from the divine patron of nonsense. If you were trying to kill Shahar, why would you put yourself in exactly the same danger as you put her?” 

I didn’t bother to point out that he and Shahar also shared exactly the same  _ foreign blood _ , even if Deka had drawn the unlucky hand that meant his origins were blazoned on his face. That made no sense either, but it was a sort of nonsense that a thousand years of Arameri had almost gotten me to take for sense.

“To cover my trail,” said Deka, “obviously.” His voice was old now, so old it was giving me a bit of a headache. “A few broken limbs would be a small price to pay for exacting my revenge upon the Arameri heir. It was only thanks to the timely intervention of whoever was telling the story that Shahar had been pulled alive from the rubble and my wicked designs thwarted. 

“People wanted to know why I’d been allowed to live as long as I had. There were at least two people that Shahar told me about who had come to her, offering to do away with me, attempting to curry favor with her.

“She...” His voice was thick with pain. “I wasn’t able to help her. I didn’t know what to do; I couldn’t understand why everyone was trying to blame this on me. And she had me sent away. Begged our mother to pack me off to the Litaria; told her that she would need a First Scrivener some day. To her credit, I think she really was trying to save my life.

“I didn’t understand it at the time, of course. As soon as I was well enough to walk, I tried to catch Shahar alone, before I’d be sent away. I wanted – I wanted us to try to summon you back, and I thought we had to do it together. I knew  _ we  _ hadn’t done anything, and I couldn’t believe it had been you. If we could get you back, you could clear my name, and I could stay with my sister. And I was worried – if something had done this, to all of us, then you might be hurt, you might be trapped, you might be suffering somewhere...”

Deka fell silent, and I saw him trace the sigil on his forehead with a finger in an almost unconscious gesture.

“That made her angry,” he said after a long moment, “and so… She wanted to hurt me like I’d hurt her. She asked our mother to have my mark filled in before I was sent away. So she would have nothing to fear from me, she said.”

I let out a long sigh. Was this the girl who’d refused to choose between her innocence and her brother’s life? Oh well. 

“It was nice while it lasted,” I said aloud.

“What?”

“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Arameri gotta Arameri. So they finally got their collar on you after all.” I pushed myself up to sit on the floor, buoyed by the bullying and by an obscure feeling that had nothing to do with my nature — a cross between anger and bitter joy. “You won’t get used to it. I didn’t. You’ll still hate them long after their bones are cold in their graves. And here’s the real kicker: you might still love them too.”

Deka looked at me with eight years worth of pain and shame written on his open-book face.

“We made a promise to each other, you know,” he said, “as practice. Before we tried to take the oath with you. She swore to me, and I to her, that we would — be different. That we wouldn’t be like the old Arameri. That we would be good. She cried when I showed her what I’d read about you in the histories.”

“That must have been terrible,” I interjected flatly. “For her. To read about.”

Deka looked at me, not taking the bait. “That was why she wanted to be your friend.”

“Yup,” I said, and yawned. Not quite the full cat-display of fangs and tongue-rasps, but the same spirit. “That is indeed how it goes. Everyone thinks they’re going to be one of the good ones, until the first time something goes wrong. And then you find out who’s wearing the collar and who’s holding the leash. Still, I’m glad I got to taste your innocence before dear darling sweet sister decided to set it on fire and piss on the ashes.”

While I was still speaking, Deka got up and went to the heavy wooden desk that stood against one of the walls, covered with books and papers. He traced a symbol on one of its front panels, and a thin drawer opened. For all that he’d been exiled in humiliation, I thought, he actually seemed to have found his vocation here as a scrivener. He moved with a confidence more suited to a master than a student, and if this room was his (he wouldn’t be attempting dangerous summoning rituals in someone else’s office, would he?) then even at his age he had achieved some rank within the Litaria itself.

He drew out a sheet of paper, and came back to sit beside me, turning it so I could see. A single line of a hand that must be Shahar’s.  _ Come home. _

“Eight years,” he said softly. “I was so angry, for so long… We’d made the exact same oath, suffered the exact same result; why was I the dangerous one to be punished and she the special one to be protected? She tried to write to me, at first, and I couldn’t even muster the courage to open the letters. Even seeing them, I felt — it was almost a physical sickness. I couldn’t touch them. I sent them back unopened, and after a while she just… stopped. And the lack of letters hurt me as much as the letters themselves had. 

“I thought she hated me. I could come up with a dozen reasons she would. And then I thought that she’d forgotten me; that she just didn’t care anymore. I told myself I didn’t care either. And then—”

He smiled. That didn’t seem like it meant anything good for Shahar. 

“I’m going back to Sky.”

“Shahar crooks her little finger and you must obey, huh?”

“It’s not that. If I were being officially summoned back this letter would be more than one line and it would be from my mother. This…” He ran his hand thoughtfully over the sheet of paper. “I think she needs me. If the rumors are true, our mother is using her as a pawn in her marriage games. Remath may have disposed of me, but she can’t do that to Shahar. I’ll do whatever it takes to stop her.” One hand curled into a fist.

I sighed. “It’s an extremely tempting fantasy, Deka; who among us hasn’t wanted to murder one or more of their parents? But you do know that that mark on your forehead will prevent you from so much as lifting a finger in the direction of the family head?”

He gave me a long, cool, evaluative look. “Sieh,” he said suddenly. “I want to show you something.”

And there, through all the adult sorrow and strategy, was a thread of pure childhood, eager and uncalculating.  _ Look at this!  _ I drank it down, feeling some of my strength returning. Deka undid the ties at his throat, opening his shirt and slipping it off one shoulder.

At first I thought that he had, in true scrivener fashion, taken to writing the godspeech on his body. But no, these weren’t the fading ink sigils that a scrivener might have applied after he successfully learned a spell; they were tattoos, every bit as permanent as the one that scarred his forehead. His hands too. Now I looked at them properly, they weren’t temporary marks at all. And they weren’t — I peered closer — they weren’t written in any existing scrivener script, any of the angular approximations of the words that were so much more than shape or sound. 

And the power in them! I could see it, feel it even, lying in wait, quiet as words on a page. This could hardly be called scrivening, it was so much farther advanced than the crude efforts of his fellows. Where other scriveners were making grocery lists, Dekarta Arameri was a poet — stretching the boundaries of the language. Not just using it, but expanding it. I gasped for the beauty of it. (And a little bit for the beauty of his shoulders and torso;  _ right, _ that was one of the reasons I never liked spending much time in adolescence.)

I got to my feet, reaching out my hand to trace the ink-darkened skin of his chest. Half of the signs I couldn’t even recognize immediately, but that — that was the last component of the summoning sigil, and etched into its center was  _ me. _

A bit of a waste, using the limited real estate of one’s personal torso for a sigil that’s only really good for one thing. The other tattoos that wound around his body could be turned to many purposes, as all words can be. But my name — that meant  _ me _ and nothing else. And he’d made it a permanent part of himself. That made me feel several ways, none of which I understood and all of which I swept aside to deal with later. We weren’t talking about me, we were talking about Deka, whose every gesture could be a spell and whose whole body was interwoven with power.

With this command of the language that shaped reality, he could easily be as powerful as some of my siblings. Hells, probably as powerful as me, at least in my current state of mortal-itis. 

Demonshit.

“Oh Deka,” I whispered. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Am I going to have to kill you after all? And just when I was starting to like you. You’ve made yourself into the greatest weapon this continent has seen in generations. And as long as you’ve got that restraining bolt in your forehead, you’re a weapon in the hands of the Arameri.”

Deka flicked his shirt closed. “I do not think so.” He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward, putting his face so close to mine that I could kiss him. Or bite him. Or both—

“Look at me, Sieh.”

And I looked — not just at his face, but at his soul, that beautiful soul for which I had spared his life so long ago, marked now by sorrow and shame but beautiful still. I saw the gentleness and the steel, the loyalty and the hurt, the youth and the compassion and the frightening ambition and I saw the tattoos invisible on his face, amber ink on amber skin, coiling around the fullblood sigil. 

He hadn’t broken the bond. He had —  _ recontextualized  _ it, changed its meaning. Poetry written in the language of the universe, a trickster’s game turning words on their heads. I saw it, and he knew that I saw it, and he smiled.

I definitely had to kiss him then.

“I studied you,” he whispered against my cheek. “I studied you until I’d exhausted the resources of every archive I could access, and when I could learn no more of you, I studied myself. You can see it, can’t you? What I was able to make of myself?” He gently pulled back. “And that’s why I’m going to help my sister. Because now I don’t have to. And she deserves to know that.”

I went cold, the taste of his lips on mine fading into bitterness. 

“Just like that?” The ice in my voice was more my father’s than mine. “A family member, in anger, binds you to eternal servitude, and you just, what,  _ walk it off?” _

He spoke as if from very far away, distant and peaceful. “I can’t serve her — not truly — unless I don’t have to. Now I can stand at her side again. And she needs me.”

“You can’t do it, Deka.” I was shaking, dizzy with the nausea that had begun to twist in my belly. “What if she’s not worth it?”

“She is,” he said calmly. “I know her.”

“You knew a child eight years ago!” I snapped. “She may have treasured you once — what child doesn’t have a favorite toy — but the minute she had even the smallest reason to be afraid of you, she grew up enough to put you under her feet. Do you know what she’s spent every day of the last eight years doing? I can tell you. I’ve seen this play out again and again over centuries. When she thinks of you at all, she congratulates herself on her own wisdom for controlling you. She tells herself she had no choice. She tells herself it was for your own good. She tells herself you are a menace that must be controlled, that you are her brother and her possession and there is no contradiction between the two. Seek freedom, seek revenge, seek anything you like, but you cannot, you must not forgive this —”

I caught myself on hands and knees as I dropped forward, retching and spitting up blood. That might not have been the smartest thing to say. There was no way I could make a concentrated assault on the innocence of childhood, especially in my weakened state, and not injure myself in doing so. Instantly Deka’s arm was around my shoulders, and I leaned helplessly into the offered support.

“No one is saying you have to forgive them, Sieh,” he said, very quietly. 

I wiped my mouth on my arm.

“If I am to have revenge, it’s not  _ on _ my sister, but  _ for  _ her. What happened was not fair to me, but it wasn’t fair to her either. No one should have that much power over anyone, but especially not a child. How many times have you heard a child in anger call someone the worst thing they can think of? But instead of  _ poopyhead  _ she called me  _ servant, _ and her words had a power they should never have been allowed to have. I have given myself my freedom, and given her back her innocence. I’m keeping that promise, Sieh, the one just for us.  _ We’re going to be different.” _

He spoke as if by sheer force of will he meant to conjure up a world in which it was possible to be good. And there it was, as absurd as it was unmistakable: innocence. It was not the innocence of ignorance, but a painstakingly constructed argument, not  _ I do not know _ but  _ I am not guilty. _

Constructed or not, innocence was innocence, and I was so weak. I put down my head and drank it in, drew it into me, savoring its strange taste. I nestled against his marked chest, hearing the magic pulsing through his sigils like the blood through his veins, feeling the steady tap-thump of his heart. After a moment he put his hand to my head and began stroking my hair, as gently and deliberately as a mother with a fractious child, or a child with a feral cat who has allowed him to approach for the first time.

“It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s all right. Sleep. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to fix everything…”

I slept.

****

It ended up being childishly simple to sneak into the heavily guarded palace of the rulers of the world. Any gate sigil that opened into the palace of Sky would have set off every ward and alarm in the area, but Deka, instead, set up his gate into one of the dead spaces. (“How do you know about those?” I had demanded. “I told you,” he’d responded, “I made a study of you.”)

I think I might have honestly been expecting that Shahar would fling herself into her brother’s arms when she saw him. Deka’s optimism (or whatever the hell his outlook was) must have been catching. Or maybe I’m just a sap. If Itempas had flung himself at my feet and begged for my forgiveness, if he had wrapped me in his arms and called me  _ son — _

Who am I kidding. I would have shanked him through the chest.

But at any rate, Shahar just stood there in the entrance to Deka’s old room, her hair a carefully controlled explosion of curls, a new hardness in her face and several intriguing new dimensions to her body ( _ now, _ Sixteen? Seriously?) Her eyes flickered back and forth between me and her brother.

“You brought  _ Sieh?” _

“I found him,” Deka said carefully. “I called him. And he came back.”

Shahar was Sky-bred, and her education in concealing her emotions must be nearly complete. But the slip was unmistakable: her face twisted, just for a moment, too quickly to catch anything but the pain Was she – jealous? Of me, or of Deka?

“I’m right here, you know,” I complained loudly. “I haven’t lost my hearing. Yet. I hear that’s supposed to kick in at, what, seventy? Eighty?”

Shahar’s brows drew together.

“Something’s happened to him,” Deka explained. “The — the accident, when we took the oath. I think it hurt him as much as it hurt us. He can’t change shape any more, not properly. It’s like he’s — well, you know how a mortal can become a god? It’s like he’s becoming mortal.”

Shahar gave me a wide smile positively chilling in its diplomacy. “Welcome to human existence, Lord Sieh; do let me show you around. The bathrooms are this way if you need to freshen up, and right over  _ here  _ we have our inevitable deaths —”

All of a sudden I actually missed her; eight years worth of loneliness crashing down at once. I dashed across the room and threw my arms around her. She went iron-rigid in my arms but after a moment I felt her soften against me, her own arms tightening around me. She smiled, which is what Arameri do when they’re about to cry.

“I missed you,” she said, her head on my shoulder. “I missed you and I hated you and I worried about you and I’m so sorry –“

Still didn’t know whether she was talking to me or to her brother. I doubt she did either.

“Come with me. I have a private audience with my mother.”

Remath’s private audience chamber was designed to make an impression, just like everything else in Sky. One of the curving walls was transparent, looking out over the wide plains far below, the boughs and leaves of the World Tree framing the view rather than obstructing it. In its way, it was more imposing than the throne room. The ruler-ish of the world stood with her back to us, looking out over her dominion. I resisted the impulse to breathe on the window and write rude words in the mist.

“Dekarta,” she said, turning toward us. “And Lord Sieh. What a pleasant surprise.” From the way she raked us with her eyes, first me than Deka, I got the impression that his presence wasn’t a surprise and mine wasn’t pleasant.

“I had thought to have Dekarta complete his studies at the Litaria before summoning him back to Sky,” she went on, turning to her daughter and speaking as if she were picking up a conversation that the two of them had just left off, “but since you decided that you required his presence now, I let your own judgment guide your actions. He is yours, after all – he will be your First Scrivener, not mine. You may occupy yourself with the arrangement of your personal retinue; my attention, I’m afraid, is going to have to remain with the negotiations with the Teman Protectorate.”

Deka drew himself up beside me, straight-backed, iron-shouldered, face completely blank, except for everything that was literally written on it. To be fair, most of that was invisible to the human eye. Remath couldn’t see it, but the tattoos that covered his face were pulsing with energy, heavy and urgent as words unspoken. 

Shahar stepped forward, letting the door fall closed behind us. “That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about, Mother.”

Remath inclined her head, poised between graciousness and sternness.  _ Go on. _

“I want you to take off his sigil. I won’t have my brother as my servant.”

I saw Deka’s haughty shoulders relax, just slightly, his lips part. Shahar’s hand twitched toward his briefly, as if she longed to take it in hers, to stand before their mother as they had once stood before me, bargaining for their lives and freedom.

“Shahar.” Remath’s voice was as cool and unmoved as if she were talking about grain tariffs instead of the freedom of her own personal children. “You know I can’t do that.”

“My honored mother. You absolutely can. It’s tied to your authority; if the Head Scrivener has your directive to work with he can remove the effects of the mark.”

Deka said nothing but his eyes flickered with pride. Shahar had been doing her homework about the nature and capacity of scrivening. Not much of it would be applicable to his particular branch of the art, but he had said nothing about his innovations — or his self-won freedom — and I wasn’t about to blow his cover. The whole thing had the air of a fantastic trick being played, and I loved to see it.

“I can’t do that,” said Remath, “because of the message it would send about you. Whatever you may think of me, I don’t believe in our family’s traditional child-rearing principle of letting my children tear each other apart like baby sand-sharks. I am not going to announce to the world that I have reversed the decision to protect you from your brother, and that they may now watch eagerly to see which one of you survives the next year. You made a declaration about your relationship when you had him bound to the family. This is one of the things you have to learn about rule, Shahar: you must live with the consequences of your decisions.”

Shahar bared a sliver of her white teeth; it couldn’t be called a smile. “Living with the consequences of my decisions — and your decisions — and the decisions of our whole family for the last few thousand years — is exactly what I’m doing. When I was eight, and hurt, and angry, I made a decision. And now I’m dealing with the consequence. Take off his mark.”

Deka’s eyes were cold and his lips were set. It was doing something to him, hearing his mother and his sister haggling over his freedom just as if he weren’t there. Oh, he’d understood his situation, even felt the shame and the hurt of it, but eight years away from the family, eight years away from the sidelong glances and the whispers, had let his heart grow sheltered and strong as a greenhouse sapling that now felt the winter winds for the first time.

Remath noted the storm in his eyes, but continued to address Shahar. “Your brother — thanks to your  _ farsighted  _ decision to put him under control — cannot raise a hand to me.”

“He can’t,” Shahar said, “but I can.”

She put her hand to her hair, and in one smooth motion she had a silver dagger at Remath’s throat, pressing her mother back against the reinforced glass of the window.

Even quicker on the draw than she had been at six, when she’d knifed me —  _ me —  _ in the back. I knew there was a reason I liked her! But this was dangerous. Shahar loved her mother, much more than Deka did, with his still-unhealed scars radiating with fresh pain. And that meant she might do something genuinely stupid.

Remath looked at her, her eyes old and sad. Perhaps she thought she really did love both of her children. She had groomed Shahar as her replacement, and Deka – well, she had let him live, hadn’t she?

“You’re smarter than this, Shahar,” she said, just as if she were in a schoolroom and not pressed against a window with her daughter’s knife at her neck. It wasn’t even pressing hard enough to indent the skin, but it was so sharp that the mere contact had drawn a hair-thin line of blood. “Go ahead. Work it out. I die. You attempt to declare yourself the family head. You can probably secure the scrivener corps to defend your claim but you won’t have the guards; they’re going to back your cousin Nevra. The Arameri are vulnerable now, more than they’ve ever been, and Nevra’s got a sister he can use to secure the Teman Protectorate with a marriage.” 

Remath went on, with such indifferent ease that she must have worked out this particular scenario long ago. “Even if you can keep Sky from descending into outright civil war, the High North will strike. They’re not ready, but with an opportunity like this they won’t have to be. My blood won’t be dry on the floor before the warships begin pulling out of the Tokland ports. And Sky-in-Shadow will fall, and the last remnants of the Bright will end, and there will be war across the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and you and your brother might even live to see it.”

That was genuinely horrifying to Shahar, but at my side, Deka’s eyes went darker still. Made sense that ‘our dynasty will end and our social order will be overturned’ would sound a lot more tempting to someone who’d been made a slave than to someone who’d been made a queen. But Remath wasn’t pitching her argument for her son’s ears. It was as if she’d noted his presence in the room, and then forgotten about it.

Locked together against the thick curved glass, Shahar set her teeth and refused to move, and Remath refused to react. It was like watching two ice cubes having a freeze-off. I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. Deka elbowed me in the ribs, but neither of the women so much as blinked.

“You do know why I left you free, my sweet girl,” said Remath. “In the old days, every family member wore that full mark, but I left you free — to attack me, to kill me if you could. It was for my sake as much as yours. I left you free because it kept me from getting lazy or stupid or dulled by power. I had to make sure it would always be in your interests to leave me alive. If it also meant there was trust between us — well, I did enjoy it, while it lasted.”

“If you take off his sigil,” Shahar said, “I’ll marry Dattenay Canru. You’ll have the Teman Protectorate between us and the North.”

She had shifted from threats to bargaining without so much as a breath between. It was kind of funny, I thought, to watch someone abjectly surrender while still holding a knife to someone’s throat. Remath wasn’t thrown off balance, but it did give her pause.

OK, but do you know about cats though? So when a dog rolls over and shows its belly, it’s saying  _ look, you can disembowel me if you like! But you wouldn’t though, would you?  _ When a cat rolls over and shows its belly, it’s pointing all five of its knife-ends at you.  _ Look, you can disembowel me if you – PSYCH NOW I AM KICKING YOUR FACE TO SHREDS. _

Remath didn’t seem to know which kind of belly she was looking at.

A voice spoke from my side. “Enough.”

Deka strode up to his mother and sister. He made a quick gesture in the direction of the knife, a shimmering shape that seemed to linger in the air as the knife itself vanished and Shahar jerked back her hand with a small cry. Remath’s head whipped around, real dismay cracking through the Arameri façade.

“What — ”

Another sigil drawn on the air, ice-white across the surface of reality, and the window shattered behind her. A: what the  _ fuck _ , I’d built that window, it should have taken another  _ god _ to break it, and B, slightly more relevant: between the rush of air and the way that Shahar had her pressed off balance against the window, Remath stumbled backwards over the edge, and fell without a sound.

Deka froze, his hand upraised. Had he meant to do that? If he acted quickly enough, could he still save his mother? It was a  _ very _ long way from Sky to the ground, after all. Was this his world in which it was possible to be good?

Shahar screamed and flung herself forward, reaching after her mother and throwing herself off balance. Deka threw himself after his sister, and I leaped forward, grabbing both of them by the hands, not thinking of risk or consequences or anything other than the fact that I didn’t want them to be hurt.

The world went –

It went.

No,  _ no,  _ it was happening again, the wind, the screaming, reality tearing itself apart around us, my twins’ hands, my  _ friends’  _ hands, locked in mine. But none of us were quite children now, and there was more to us than shock and pain. I felt them both beside me, and I could see both of them, stripped to their souls, bound to each other and to me. All around us was a buzzing roar beyond hearing. The Maelstrom. The chaos from which the world was born.

It whirled between us and through us:  _ let her fall, let it all fall, what is there worth saving in it? Save me, save us, save it if you love me. _

_ I wanted a world where we could be good. _

_ I wanted a world where we could be _

_ I wanted a world where we could _

_ I wanted a world _

_ I wanted— _

Light and sound and solidity were returning, the shredded edges of reality drawing back together. The three of us, Shahar and Deka and I, were kneeling on the floor of the audience chamber, scoured of even its austere furnishings by the violent wind. Beneath the window, the World Tree had burst into blossom, and cradled on the flower lay Remath.

***

It wasn’t all that simple. Nothing ever is. Look, if you could resolve familial trauma just by shoving mom out a window and then fusing with a couple of close friends into some kind of reality-bending divine force in order to spare her, then we’d all be doing it. Actually, do you think I could get Itempas to stand really close to a window?

Remath made plain her intentions to abdicate in favor of her joint heirs, and accelerated the process of unwinding the last vestiges of Arameri dominion. A fading empire wouldn't be everyone's idea of a handsome inheritance, but it was what all three of them, in their very different ways, wanted. And she was proud of both her children now (I guess we've found what it takes to offset the stigma of foreign blood: invent an entirely new branch of magic). That didn't make up for what had happened, but it eased Deka's pain just a little, and he hated the fact that it did.

Deka’s certainty was shaken, and his constructed innocence cracked.  _ I am not guilty,  _ he had declared to himself, but now he would never know if, by himself, he would have chosen his mother’s death or not. The world was pretty damn lucky that despite the pain and the doubt and the having made himself into a superweapon, he had somehow managed to retain his gentleness. I think it was the loyalty that shielded him: he wanted to be the kind of person his sister thought he was, just as he'd wanted for her.

Shahar honestly took the whole thing a lot better than I would have expected — not everyone would have reacted so well to the announcement that they were now heir to the work of their own undoing. But I think it soothed her, eased the scar on her soul from what she had done to her brother and herself that day.  _ This is the work: when you come of age, you will continue to build a world by unbuilding it.  _

A world where, perhaps, I could join them.


End file.
